The Corpus: The emotional rollecoaster that represents the life of Kanye West and the type of music he created.
The Corpus
For this course the well known Hip Hop artist Kanye West has been chosen. Beside being active in the music industry, he also works as a fashion designer and a politician.
He started producing music for mainstream artist to promote his own rapping career. In 2004 he released his first album ‘The College Dropout’ which jump started his career. Kanye West had a lot of controversial media attention and is known for having manic moments. The sales of his albums have declined since his first album. This Corpus focuses on each album, and tries to find a correlation between the features of the songs and the decline in sales of his albums. We will analyze several periods of his career.
The College Dropout and Late Registration: 2003-2006
The first album Kanye West produced was called The College Dropout. This album acclaimed triple platinum and was a successful start for Kanye. Just before the second album Late Registration was released he had his first big controversy. At the Concert for Hurricane Relief he called out George Bush by saying that he doesn’t care about black people. Also he stormed out the awards because he lost the award for Best New Artist to Gretchen Wilson. This is were you first see that Kanye has struggles with his mental state and that he has manic episodes. Because he sold so many albums, Kanye decided to create a record label called GOOD Music. These first two albums had the highest valence compared to his later albums, which we will discuss later. Important is that a downward trend is seen during the releases of his albums throughout his career.
Graduation and, 808s and Heartbreak: 2007-2009
In these albums he started to work with electronic music from the eighties. Also his chord progression was inspired by The Rolling Stones. He also started working with big artist like Daft Punk and Kid Cudi. This is were his creative talent in producing was coming to fruition, and his productions were more unique than other Hip Hop artists at the time.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: 2010-2012
Yeezus: 2013-2015
Ye and Jesus Is King: 2016-2019
The trend of Kanye from 2003 to 2019
The features from the Spotify API
Spotify has different things
Analyzing the loss in valence of each album
Valence by album from 2003 to 2019
Kanye west produced 9 albums during his career. We used the Spotify API to extract the valence of each track in each album. Valence is a term used in psychology to describe the emotion of a specific event. Here a low valence is correlated to averseness and positive to goodness. The spotify API uses this feature to describe if a song has a negative emotion like fear and anger, or a positive emotion like joy and happiness.
Self Similarity Matrices for a track in each album
SSM Matrix
Chordograms Tempogram and it’s detailed cock in my ass
Tempograms between two popular songs